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How to define levels of explanation and evaluate their indispensability

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Abstract

Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the ‘is lower than’ relation, and this relation admits of different readings. I then suggest four rigorous definitions of the ‘is lower than’ relation, and show that the abstractness argument’s prospects are much brighter for some of these definitions than for others. To show this, I evaluate the so-called ‘disjunctive threat’ to the abstractness argument.

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Notes

  1. For example, Kim (1998, pp. 104–105), Rosenberg (2001, p. 756) and Clapp (2001) say that all higher explanations are in principle replaceable. See the citations throughout this paper for those who disagree.

  2. See footnotes 3–6 and 16–19, excluding Potochnik and Lange.

  3. Jackson and Pettit (1992), Kincaid (1997a), Sober (1999) and Marchionni (2008) think lower explanations often can provide understanding of the phenomenon in question; contrast Putnam (1973, pp. 296–298) and Garfinkel (1981). In fact, they think lower explanations can provide some understanding that the higher explanation in question does not; thus the two explanations complement each other.

  4. Putnam (1973, p. 296), Fodor (1974, p. 113), Kitcher (1984), Kincaid (1997a, p. 89), Sawyer (2002, pp. 540, 552), Woodward (2003, p. 355) and Haug (2011b, p. 245) make it clear that the thesis they defend is not a ‘subjective’ one pertaining to ‘cognitive limitations’ (Haug 2011a). Similarly MacDonald (1985, p. 201), Sober (1999, footnote 9) and Lange (2004, p. 105) defend a thesis about replaceability ‘in principle’. See also Pereboom and Kornblith (1991) and Block (1997). Note for example Jackson and Pettit’s (1992) discussion of the movements of individual molecules in a gas. Clearly this knowledge is only available to highly idealized inquirers; so their defence of their thesis doesn’t rest on any claims about cognitive limitations.

  5. Putnam (1973, pp. 296–297), Garfinkel (1981, pp. 91–96), Kitcher (1984), Marras (1993, p. 279), Antony (1999, p. 16) as well as Kincaid (1986, pp. 40–43, 1993, p. 24, 1997a) and Potochnik (2010, p. 69) talk of higher explanations ‘capturing’ ‘highlighting’ or ‘bringing out’ patterns.

  6. The deductive formulation. It is quite easy for a pattern to constitute a genuine one: each true explanation describes a genuine pattern. And so true higher explanations describe higher patterns; whereas less abstract lower explanations do not describe these higher patterns as such. In other words, (2) directly entails (6). The abductive formulation. It is quite difficult for a pattern to constitute a genuine one. But, whenever a higher explanation (if correct) would provide understanding that the ‘rival candidate explanations’ do not, this provides good evidence that the explanation is true. Indeed, it provides good evidence that the explanation describes a genuine pattern. See for example Sturgeon (1985), Wright (1992, Chap. 5), LaPorte (2004, pp. 19–20), Baker (2007, p. 8), and Beebee and Sabbarton-Leary (2010, Chap. 1). In other words, (4) abductively supports (6). Incidentally, one interesting feature of this ‘inference to the best explanation’ is that the higher explanation and the ‘rival’ lower explanations here are not incompatible explanations; contrast (Lipton 1991).

  7. Antony (2008) contends that higher properties are identical to lower properties. But lower explanations fail to describe higher laws as such, because they use lower concepts.

  8. Indeed this is the original meaning of the terms. See Oppenheim and Putnam (1958), Garfinkel (1981, pp. 15, 44), MacDonald (1985, p. 202), Marras (1993), Kincaid (1997b, e.g. 3), Antony (1999, p. 18) and Sober (1999).

  9. See Kim (1984, pp. 169–70), Bacon (1986) and Kim (1991, p. 151).

  10. See Kincaid (1986, p. 38, 1993, p. 23), Weslake (2010, pp. 287–289) and especially Kincaid (1997a, pp. 72–74) for an explicit endorsement. It’s also very clear that Fodor (1974, 1997), Pereboom and Kornblith (1991), Block (1997), and Antony (1999) endorse infinite too. Refer also to Sect. 6 and to footnote 4.

  11. See van Cleve (1990, p. 222), Chalmers (2006) and Noordhof (2010, pp. 71–73) for this characterization of the mainstream position and of emergentism; and Silberstein (2012) for complications.

  12. See all the inflationists cited in Sects. 1, 6 and the present section.

  13. Note that this leaves open the question of whether X = A; in constast to X = ‘being an HCl solution’, for example.

  14. See Lewis (1972) and Shoemaker (2007, Chap. 2) for the ‘lower order’ and the ‘subset’ accounts of role occupation respectively.

  15. See Lewis (1972), Fodor (1974), Shapiro (2000), Shoemaker (2007), and Haug (2011a).

  16. See the footnotes throughout this section. For example, Weslake (2010, p. 274) and Lange (2004, p. 105) each assume that Jackson and Pettit (1992) adopt the same understanding of the relation as they do. But this is probably false; see Sect. 4 for Lange, and footnotes in the present section for Weslake, Jackson and Pettit.

  17. This is also Jackson and Pettit’s (1992, pp. 6–7) official definition; although they don’t always stick to it (see following footnotes).

  18. On these two definitions we have: [HCl] \(<\) [Acid]; and [Acid] \(\le \) [150 J Mean kinetic energy]; and [150 J Mean Kinetic Energy] \(<\) [Hot]. (Read \(<\) as ‘is lower than’ and \(\le \) as ‘is not higher than’.) Suppose for reductio that \(<\) constituted a total ordering. It would follow that [HCl] \(<\) [Hot]. But [HCl] is not lower than [Hot], on either of these two definitions. So we have a contradiction. So \(<\) is not a total ordering.

  19. Zahle (2003) and Marchionni (2008, p. 316) explicitly endorse something roughly like this; although they don’t discuss details involving intrinsic states and binary relations. And Weslake (2010, p. 287) is implicitly committed to something like this, even though it sometimes looks as if he has the ‘is more specific than’ relation in mind instead. Garfinkel (1981) and Ylikoski (2011) may perhaps have a hybrid of the ‘is more specific than’ and ‘is more microscopically structured than’ relation in mind. It’s unclear. At points Jackson and Pettit (1992) seem to adopt such a hybrid, although this is not their official view (see footnotes above).

  20. See Potochnik and McGill (2012) for some potential shortcomings of this approach.

  21. See Weatherson and Marshall (2014, Sect. 1.3) on intrinsic binary relations.

  22. For example, Prior et al. (1982) claim that essentially dispositional states—such as the state of being acidic—are distinct from the microscopically structured properties in which they are grounded.

  23. By ‘partition’ I mean that a collection of states for which: necessarily, the entity in question will be in one of the states in the collection.

  24. Instead one has to procede indirectly: Sect. 2 provided an argument that for each macroscopic explanation there is a K-parallel explanation that only refers to microscopically structured states. It follows immediately that for each macroscopic explanation there is a K-parallel explanation that only refers to microscopic states.

  25. Read this mental state in a suitably ‘internalist’ way. The story for ‘externalist’ mental states will be very different.

  26. Contrast Marchionni (2008) who has a more restrictive definition in mind, I suspect.

  27. Several deflationists, it should be noted, would deny states. These deflationists say that all explanations refer to lower states. What distinguishes higher explanations is that higher explanations from lower ones refer to lower states by using higher concepts, they say. Note that on this view the lower state that a given higher concept refers to will vary from semantic context to semantic context; see Kim (1998), Heil (2003) and in some moods Lewis (1994).

  28. See also Block (1995) and Potochnik (2010) for some very different examples.

  29. See the extensive citations throughout Sects. 1, 2 and the present section; in particular Fodor (1974; 1997), Kincaid (1986, p. 38, 1997b, p. 3), Antony and Levine (1997), Antony (1999), Weslake (2010, pp. 287–288), Haug (2011a, b) and especially Kincaid (1997a) and perhaps also Putnam (1967, p. 437). Consult Pereboom and Kornblith (1991) and Block (1997), who endorse response E themselves, and also attribute it to Putnam and Fodor.

  30. Their vague idea is that higher explanations are ‘essentially involved’ in ‘capturing’ higher patterns which appear ‘arbitrary’ and ‘heterogeneous’ from the lower ‘point of view’. This is how Kitcher (1984), Kincaid (1986, p. 34), Pereboom and Kornblith (1991), and Antony and Levine (1997, p. 94) express the idea.

  31. Fodor argues that breadth of jurisdiction indicates ‘projectability’, which in turn indicates lawhood. But it is clear that lawhood is tied very closely to explanation for Fodor (1997, p. 149). So it is fair to interpret Fodor as running a version of the explanatory abstractness argument; as I do, and as Sober (1999, footnote 17) does.

  32. Haug (2011a) may also interpret Fodor (1997) this way, but I’m skeptical of this interpretation.

  33. Indeed, see Clarke (Forthcoming) for criticisms of arguments that draw the opposite conclusion.

  34. See also Haug’s (2011a) criticisms of response E with abstractness understood as the generality of the particular factors an explanation invokes.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Christopher Cowie, Tim Lewens and Nick Shea for their helpful comments on an ancestor of this manuscript; and also to two anonymous referees for their generous suggestions. This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no 284123.

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    Christopher Clarke

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Clarke, C. How to define levels of explanation and evaluate their indispensability. Synthese 194, 2211–2231 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1053-9

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